A note on making HarmonizePy public, and why we wanted a Python version of HarmonizR's missing-value-aware batch correction.

The story of a small ProteomeXchange metadata tool that started as a fragile Selenium parser and became a PyPI package the lab can actually depend on.

C and C++ cover the classic extension story. Rust through extendr and Savvy brings memory safety to the table. Both are modern, both are performant. Neither fits the R C API boundary as naturally as a language designed to treat C interop as a first-class feature. Early observations from zigr: six backends, 23 tasks, and a case for Zig as the missing option.

z-toml reached a stable, tested version with TOML v1.1 support, writer support, and passing validation against the toml-test corpus.

A note on why I forked Andrew Kelley's poop into zebrac, what I have added so far, and the direction I want to take it next.

Early prototype of a domain-specific compression codec for mass spectrometry data. Lossless path beats gzip and comes close to mzMLb. Lossy at q=4096 hits 13.17 MiB from 75.55 MiB mzML. Single DDA dataset. Decode is 27x faster than mzMLb. Early days.

Zero-dependency FASTA indexing that matches samtools byte-for-byte while running up to 17x faster. Built in Zig with SIMD and mmap. Also: a proof of concept that needs Zig 0.14, has no gzip support, and cannot extract sequences yet.

A note on what I am doing with ZagPlot, a small private Zig plotting project. Not a finished tool, just an excuse to learn graphics, API design, and Zig's systems story from the inside.

The search engine space is crowded, fast-moving, and genuinely competitive. DIA-NN, Spectronaut, FragPipe, MaxQuant, and Sage each carved a niche. A Zig-based search engine is not the right next step. The gap between engines might be.

Nextflow and Snakemake both get the big things right and the small things wrong. A bioinformatics-specific engine with no runtime and a single static binary might fix the part that actually costs time.

I already knew Rust. I'm learning Zig anyway. Not because it's better, but because it fits a specific kind of work: small, fast tools that live forever in pipelines. An early take, not a manifesto.